Medical pluralism and epistemic contestations in colonial southwestern (Yoruba) Nigeria

This thesis, Medical Pluralism and Epistemic Contestations in Colonial Southwestern (Yorùbá) Nigeria, examines the relationships between Yorùbá traditional medicine and Western biomedicine from the beginning of the British missions in the midnineteenth century to Nigeria’s independence in 1960. The central argument of this research is how the interactions between colonial medical doctors and Yoruba healers led Yoruba healers to seek legitimacy for their practices, thereby ensuring they were not outrightly repressed or dismissed. Yoruba medicine, rooted in Ifá divination, herbal medicine, rituals, and a moral-spiritual philosophy of wellbeing, functioned as a holistic therapeutic system that the Yoruba people relied on for both physical and spiritual healing. The introduction of missionary activities and, later, colonial institutions, unsettled this equilibrium and classified indigenous healing as superstitious and harmful. Nonetheless, Yorùbá healers did not simply succumb to colonial medical dominance. Instead, they adopted adaptation and resistance strategies. Both historical and anthropological studies have focused on the justification of Yoruba medicine as an alternative therapy and the need for integration into mainstream health systems, but closer examination of British colonial institution in Southwestern Nigeria as evidenced by primary sources, including colonial records, medical reports, correspondence, material culture, and interviews, reveals the entanglement that influenced the distrust between the biomedicine and Yoruba traditional medicine. Thus, this thesis reconstructs the complex relationships among Yoruba healers, British medical doctors, and Britishtrained Yoruba medical doctors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in colonial southwestern Nigeria. The British Colonial system, relying on the reports of the medical doctors, introduced various legislations to challenge and suppress the Yoruba healing practices to ensure the people abandoned the traditional healing institutions and trust in Western medical practice. The colonial Yoruba became a contested space in which clashes and tensions over medical authority, therapeutic legitimacy, and epistemic value were renegotiated. The healers attempted to resolve the tensions by forming associations, standardising medicine, adopting new modes of diagnosis and apprenticeship, and seeking recognition within emerging colonial administrative structures. Hence, Yorùbá healers emerged as active interlocutors who shaped, contested, and sometimes appropriated elements of Western medical ideas. The thesis contributes to African history, colonial studies, and medical anthropology by demonstrating how colonialism repositioned the structures of medical knowledge in colonial southwestern Nigeria and institutionalised new hierarchies of healing, as well as the colonial entanglements that continue to influence health policy in postcolonial Nigeria.